Abstract
Island constraints have formed a central component of grammatical theory since the ground breaking work of Ross (1967) developing a proposal in Chomsky (1964). The papers collected in this volume address island constraints from a variety of theoretical linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. They result from a conference held at the University of Ottawa during the fall of 1989, at which specialists from several fields met to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue over the nature and manifestations of island constraints. In this brief introduction, we will attempt to summarize the intellectual setting that serves as backdrop to the investigations reported on here. To do so both fully and briefly presents a difficult challenge. But we think the inevitable risk of misrepresentation and offense is worth the effort. For it is only by making results accessible outside their domains of specialization that we can hope to foster the cross-disciplinary dialogue that we believe so essential to the growth of our knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms of language.
We are grateful to Peter Culicover, Henry Davis, and Janet Fodor for helpful comments on an earlier draft. All errors that remain are our own.
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Goodluck, H., Rochemont, M. (1992). Island Constraints: An Introduction. In: Goodluck, H., Rochemont, M. (eds) Island Constraints. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_1
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